She presses her ear against the heavy apartment door and listens. I bat at the door with my paws and growl low in my throat.
Julia retrieves a long, heavy duty flashlight from a drawer in the bombe chest next to the entry. She carefully turns the deadbolt lock so as not to make a sound, then places her finger to her lips. “Ssssshhh.” The door swings open on silent hinges.
The noise downstairs is louder now. It’s evident someone is going through Julia’s desk and file cabinet. I streak ahead, taking the stairs as silent as a panther stalking his prey. In an instant I’m out of Julia’s sight and have picked my way across the shattered glass from the French doors that are the entrance from the foyer into the detective agency’s office.
Two thugs are hard at it, one going through the files in the file cabinet and dumping folders unceremoniously onto the floor, while the other is at her desk trying to access her computer records.
I make my way unnoticed under the desk as the crunch of glass beneath Julia’s bare feet alerts the intruders that they have been discovered. Both men look up and the one at the desk immediately kills the lamp light. I spring at him and catch his trousers’ leg in my claws. By this time both men are headed for the door. Julia thinks to turn on the flashlight just as both of them barrel into her, knocking her to the glass littered floor. I am unable to maintain my grip on the trousers’ leg but I dig my claws into the intruder’s calf. But as they slip out into the night, all I have left is a scrap of fabric.
Torn between pursuit and the fallen Julia, I reluctantly give up the chase and go to her aide.
Sargent Gibbons arrived on the scene within minutes of Julia’s call to 911. He pushed his hat onto the back of his head and sighed. “Your father isn’t going to like this Julia.”
“Do you have to tell him?”
“It wouldn’t be right if I didn’t.”
Julia bit back the response that was on the tip of her tongue. She hadn’t lived at home since her return to Savannah after college but that hadn’t prevented her father from keeping a watchful eye over her. At twenty-eight she is more than an adult, more than capable of taking care of herself, but she knows she will always, in her father’s eyes, be daddy’s little girl. And all the cops who patrol the historic district of Savannah know it too. Sometimes her father’s social standing and political influence were maddening.
Julia lifted her hands in a gesture of surrender. “Fine. But don’t make it sound worse than it is.”
Sargent Gibbons looked about at the mess in her office and the broken pane of glass in the French door. Finally his gaze came to rest on her arm. “But you’re bleeding.”
“You would be too if you walked barefoot in the dark over broken glass.”
“What about your arm? How did that happen?”
Julia looked away from Sargent Gibbons and surveyed the disaster in her office. “I cut it on the door.”
He glanced down at his notepad. “So there were two of them, both wearing ski masks, about five ten to six feet tall.”
“Yes.”
“And you can’t say what they were after?”
“I can’t say because I don’t know. As far as I can tell they were searching for something in my files. I won’t know until I sort through this mess.”
He slapped the notebook closed. “So there was nothing distinctive about either of them that you remember?”
Julia lifted her shoulders in a faint shrug. “I only saw them for less than a minute. When I stepped on the broken glass the one at my desk turned off the lamp.”
“Well, we’ll dust for prints but I doubt we find any. Crooks these days know how to cover their tracks. Too many cop shows on TV.
He was about to turn into the office when he spotted Trouble sitting on the third step of the stairs. “I didn’t know you had a cat.”
“I don’t. I’m cat-sitting for a friend.”
Trouble raised his hackles and growled low in his throat.
“Not very friendly, is he?”
Julia laughed. “Trouble has a superiority complex.”
With that Trouble turned his back on the two of them and began to groom himself.
Julia laughed again. “As you can see.”
After Sargent Gibbons finally left, taking the young policeman who spent more time ogling her than collecting evidence, Julia surveyed the mess in her office. What could the two men have been searching for? Except for a discreet plaque with gold lettering beside the outer door of the building there was no way of knowing this house was any different from all the other mostly residential houses on the square. This wasn’t a random break-in, then. They were looking for something specific, something in her files.
She thought back over the past few weeks and months. All her cases were in the end stages of resolution. The information from her research had been reported to the insurance company that employed her, the conclusions already on file. She had a court hearing in two weeks on one of them and an arbitration hearing scheduled next month on another. A lot of money was at stake in the arbitration case but not so much on the court case. How would her files benefit either of them?
Well, there was no way to know until she established some sense of order.
As soon as the policemen left the premises Trouble began a circuitous inspection of the room. He pawed a couple of manila folders on the floor, sniffed the drawer pull on the file cabinet, but quickly moved on. The desk chair peaked his interest. He placed his nose to the seat of the chair and sneezed. Next he inspected several items on the desktop: a stapler, a letter opener, the lamp, and finally the keyboard of the computer. He sat squarely in the middle of the desk blotter and blinked slowly three times.
Julia looked up from the floor of the room where she was sorting sheets of paper into various piles. She sat back on her heels and watched the cat.
“What?” she said. “Don’t tell me you sniffed out the perp.” Trouble’s owner, Tammy Lynn, believed the cat had uncanny abilities, that he somehow knew things when there was no logical reason why he should.
Trouble yawned hugely and continued to sit on the desk. His eyes blinked slowly once again and he said, “Yeow.”
Julia smiled and returned to sorting receipts, photos, claim forms, and other bits of information. After a couple of minutes she paused and looked up at Trouble. She watched him patiently waiting then she got up from the floor. “All right, Sherlock, let’s see what’s so interesting up here.”
She pulled the chair up to the desk and sat, moving Trouble to the corner of the desktop as she did. It took a few seconds for the computer to boot up. She scrolled through her documents file, hoping a name would catch her eye. After about ten minutes she sat back and drummed her fingertips on the desk. “I give up. Nothing stands out.”
She started to return to the mess of files on the floor then decided to check her email. As soon as she opened Outlook, Trouble stood and walked across the keyboard.
“Trouble!” She lifted him down to the floor and shook her finger at him. “Bad kitty!”
Trouble arched his back and walked away on stiff legs, disdain radiating throughout his body.
Julia turned back to the computer screen and discovered the cat, in his prance across the keyboard, had opened an email from Sandra, a long time friend and the receptionist at her new client’s insurance agency. Staring at her from the computer was a handsome man with dark brown eyes and a strong chin.
“Hello. What’s this?” She clicked on the image and reduced it from full screen. The photo was on a dating site. Single, thirty-two, relatively new to the area, antique car enthusiast.
She studied the image. There was something familiar about that face. Douglas Heinz. Who was Douglas Heinz and where had she seen him before?
End of excerpt from Trouble in Dixie
Familiar Legacy #2
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